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In 1968, Karl Menninger, a highly visible and vocal U.S. psychiatrist, published a call to action on prison reform, The Crime of Punishment (Menninger, 1966/1968). This widely circulated book’s central idea is that punishment as practiced in penal settings is an injustice amounting to a crime. At the outset, The Crime of Punishment quickly achieved national attention. Within mainstream psychology, its antipunishment message encountered a changed climate in which punishment, thought ineffective during the period 1930 through 1960, was redefined as an effective component in learning. It also met competition from the contemporaneous Stanford Prison Experiment (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973), which quickly rose to equivalent media presence and superior disciplinary prominence. Both the Stanford Prison Experiment and The Crime of Punishment survived in the antireform era of hyperincarceration after 1974 as parallel examples of reform activism, one secular and one religious in character, illustrating some convergences of aim between psychology and psychiatry outside of specifically clinical issues.

 

Hall: You certainly have been noticed. Fifty years ago, when you began the Menninger Clinic in the middle of Kansas, who knew what advances we would make in the treatment of mental illness. You were a pioneer. Now you are 75. And you’re sticking your neck out in a fiercely controversial book about a wildly controversial subject—law and order.

Menninger: Our insistence on punishment is our crime against criminals—and our crime against ourselves.

—From an interview with Karl Menninger by Mary Harrington Hall, Managing Editor of Psychology Today (Hall, 1969, p. 63)

In 1976, environmental psychologist Robert Sommer, in his book The End of Imprisonment (Sommer, 1976), vented displeasure at the glacial rate of change in U.S. prison conditions because of the obdurate resistance of administrators and legislators. “Thus,” he said, “the task of educating the public has fallen by lot to outsiders” (p. 8). Continuing, he said that “the nation needs more busybodies like Dorothea Dix, Karl Menninger, and Jessica Mitford” if systemic change were ever to occur. Sommer’s juxtaposition of two contemporary advocates of...